A Mother's Love And Laments

Planning to take the infant on a reporting trip to war-torn Saigon—she bought a parasol and a layette, what else would be needed?

Clare McHugh

November 2, 2011

Just as a foreign correspondent sets out to understand everything about a new country once he is posted there, Joan Didion embarked in 2004 on a mission to record all the contours of the grief she experienced after witnessing the death of John Gregory Dunne, her husband of nearly 40 years. Her report, "The Year of Magical Thinking," became a best seller and later a Broadway play. The book was something of a surprise: This novelist and essayist known for her cool, unsentimental style had powerfully and intimately described the permutations of mourning—how the mind shifts and dodges, recasting events and diving into the past as it tries to process the loss of a loved one.

In "Blue Nights," Ms. Didion can revisit the same emotional territory because 20 months after Dunne suffered a fatal heart attack, Quintana, their 39-year-old daughter and only child, died from pancreatitis. But this book is unlikely to resonate as "The Year of Magical Thinking" did—the story it tells is less focused and less universal. Many people have lost a spouse (or can contemplate such a loss), but far fewer need to cope with the death of a child or the questions about one's own mortality that such an agonizing event provokes. Ms. Didion also delves into the special circumstances of Quintana's birth and upbringing, making the account even more narrowly focused. Still, the potency of her prose remains in place as Ms. Didion, determined to avoid pat conclusions or easy salves for the anguish she feels, confronts the passing of her daughter and her own aging. The book that results is raw and unsettling, a meandering mediation rather than a polished version of events. Few will find comfort here.

The book only briefly describes Ms. Didion's early days as a writer, but the period is helpful in understanding "Blue Nights." She and Dunne were married in 1964, when they were both working for magazines in New York, he for Time and she for Vogue. Soon after their wedding they moved to her native California to write novels and screenplays. The couple's main connection in Hollywood was Dunne's brother, Dominick (called Nick), then a successful producer. Through Nick they met the actress Diana Lynn. During a New Year's weekend cruise to Catalina Island, Lynn learned that Ms. Didion was unable to conceive a longed-for child; the actress gave her the name of an obstetrician who might provide a baby. In March 1966, Ms. Didion says, this doctor offered the couple "a beautiful baby girl" to adopt. They named her Quintana Roo, after a state in Mexico.

ENLARGE

Blue Nights

By Joan Didion (Knopf, 188 pages, $25)

"Adoption, I was to learn although not immediately, is hard to get right," Ms. Didion writes. From this observation much of the heart-wrenching material in "Blue Nights" flows. Starting at a young age, Quintana exhibits signs of mental instability along with fears of abandonment and rejection that Ms. Didion connects with her adoption. Various psychiatrists have various explanations for what ails Quintana, but none can cure her. Ms. Didion is skeptical of the value of their diagnoses, including borderline personality disorder.

The author recounts the glamorous aspects of her daughter's childhood, the trips to film sets and on book tours, the private-school education and the vacations with movie stars. (As a couple, Ms. Didion and her husband clearly loved the celebrity world and pursued actors, directors and rock musicians to write about, work alongside and socialize with. In the process they became celebrities themselves, though literary ones.) But Ms. Didion pre-emptively balks at the way readers are likely to see Quintana: as having had a "privileged" upbringing. Someone who experienced as much distress and anxiety as Quintana cannot be thought of as lucky, in Ms. Didion's view, even leaving aside Quintana's medical troubles, which included a terrible bout with the flu that left her, because of related infections, in a hospital intensive-care unit for the better part of the two years before she died.

The author admits her own contributions to Quintana's unhappiness. Once the beautiful baby was presented to her, Ms. Didion says, she found it hard not to treat the child like a doll. She even planned to take the infant on a reporting trip to war-torn Saigon—she had bought a parasol and a layette, what else would be needed? The trip ended up being canceled, but Ms. Didion jeers at the thoughtlessness of her younger self. As a child, Quintana became her parents' precocious sidekick at movie screenings, in luxury hotels, even during a meeting with a Hollywood agent. Ms. Didion worries in retrospect that her daughter took up that role as the only one available in the family constellation. Recalling how distracted with work she often was and how useless she could be in response to any childhood trauma—even a loose tooth—Ms. Didion wonders: "Was I the problem? Was I always the problem?"

Yes, one feels sorry for her. And never more so than when she recounts the joyous day of Quintana's wedding in 2003, when the whole family was intact for the last time. The small details of that happy occasion linger in Ms. Didion's mind, and she longs to hold on to them. But it is the larger theme of the book that time steals everything eventually—that even the blue nights, the lingering evenings of the longest days of summer, signal in their fleetingness that all that is beautiful in life will fade.

Ms. Didion has never been an upbeat writer. Over a long career, she has perhaps too easily found much to despair of both in her own country and abroad—and her portentousness can be tiresome. Now, having been given more to mourn in her own life than anyone should, she has earned the right to descend into hopelessness. Yet, with her poignant descriptions of a much-loved little girl who grew up to be a troubled but still cherished woman, Ms. Didion has created something luminous amid her self-recrimination and sorrow. It's her final gift to her daughter—one that only she could give.

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